


The Sun on the Water

by Nineveh_uk



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Gen, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 13:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15775431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nineveh_uk/pseuds/Nineveh_uk
Summary: Rae takes a trip back to the lake.





	The Sun on the Water

He took me on the paths of the night; I took him to the lake in the trunk of the Wreck. I've never been very good at doing glamour.

It wasn't fond reminiscences of being captured by vampires. I wanted to go into my family's old cabin as I hadn't last time I was there, when I sat on the porch looking out at the moonlight on the water and didn't hear them coming for me. But even if I had gone inside last time I wouldn't have known what I was looking for. Now I wanted to see if there was anything remaining of my grandmother. A message, an object, something I wouldn't have noticed before. And for obvious reasons, I didn't want to go alone.

 I could have gone with Mel, but I couldn't have explained why I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was acutely aware that someday soon I was going to have to explain everything to Mel and that I was coming to want to, but I couldn't  do it yet. That left only one person - sort-of person - and that meant another problem, because while I had accepted the necessity of searching the house by dark, at least this first time, I didn't want to arrive in the dark. There wouldn't be any vampires there - correction, probably there wouldn't be any vampires there - but I was afraid of their being vampires there. I was learning that fear has its own way of being rational.

So there I was driving the Wreck up the dirt road to the cabin with Con in the trunk. I'd thrown in a pillow and an _extremely_ thick blanket because even though I was pretty sure that Wreck as it was there weren't any actual holes in the bodywork you can't be too sure when it comes to not wanting to set a vampire on fire. Not that that was a problem I'd ever expected to have in my life, nor one that I'd admit to anywhere else but inside my own head and, by implication of handing him a blanket, the vampire himself. What he really needed was a mattress because the road was rough and the Wreck's suspension not one of its finer points, but I didn't have one of those and I couldn't exactly go round to Mom and Charlie's and ask for the loan of an air bed for extra vampire comfort. Besides, Con apparently liked to sleep - or whatever vampires call the thing that they do instead of sleep - on the floor even under normal circumstances, so he probably wouldn't complain. So what if he did? He'd agreed to come, for whatever reason of his own, balance or whatever, I could deal with a little grievance about the mode of transport. It struck me then that I hadn't in fact ever heard Con complain, and that I had had far too much experience of different vampires that I instantly knew that was a Con-thing and not a vampire-thing. I also knew that I was thinking about vampire logistics to avoid thinking about everything else: the sun glowing gold on the lake waters, my grandmother's hands warm around mine as I turned a flower into a feather. The vampires that I didn't hear coming.

I turned in behind the cabin so I could open the trunk in the shade, just in case. Contents: one vampire, not toasted. I slid my hand beneath the blanket and took his hand in mine and pulled him out into the shadow and then into the sunlight. In a moment we would go into the house. I'd still have to hold his hand there, with the west-facing windows and the holes in the roof, but first I wanted to sit in sunlight on the porch. I didn't think I could exactly exorcise the vampires of the past while sitting beside the one I'd met that same night, but I could move them into memory. I certainly hadn't done that the last time I was at the lake with SOF. I sat on the porch and swung my legs and raised my face to the sun, red and gold and dancing over the water. I was getting used to my weird dark shadow vampire vision thing even in bright daylight now. But with Con looking kind of grey-ish and sweaty by my side I started to feel kind of bad; I could hardly be unaware that even though he hadn't been stricken blind as he had feared when we first ventured out of the mansion, this couldn't be as pleasant a sensation for him as it was for me. Really, I ought to shift a bit to manoeuvre him through the door, he could stand in a sheltered part for five minutes while I basked, only that would mean opening the door - not breaking it, SOF had considerately done that when they had apparently gone back to look again without me and nailed it up in a way that wouldn't keep out the least enterprising burglar, had there been anything left to burgle - but I was reluctant to open the door because of what I might remember when I did. And maybe because I couldn't help thinking of vampires. I had done all the magic-handling I'd tried with my grandmother outside, here on the porch and by the lake. I should listen for her here before we went indoors.

One good thing about vampires: all that still as statues stuff they can do means they're good at not looking impatient.

Con wasn't looking at the sun, I realised. Perhaps he thought that would be pushing the magic sun-shade a bit too far. But he was looking at the waters, red and gold and glittering.

'Does it look like you remember it?' I asked him. 'The sunlight?'

'No. But it restores my memory of how it looked.'

'Do you miss it?'

He paused. 'No. It has been too long. But it is beautiful, and a beauty I am glad to see again.' Admission of Positive Emotion Pertaining to Daylight in a Vampire, another one of those academic papers to write. But I was glad in my turn that Con found it so, that he could see beauty in my element. That day we had escaped from Bo's gang must have been a mental trip for him in ways I hadn't even considered, and probably in ways that I couldn't consider at all. I'd survived all that; I could handle a little ghost of childhood past.

'I guess we ought to go in.' I stood, and hand in hand we pushed open the door.


End file.
